Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Chandeliers

I was in Melbourne last week and in a great bookshop on Collins Street I found a book of interviews between Ai WeiWei and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Ai WeiWei's fame has transcended the artworld (especially of late given his problems with the Chinese Government/police force) but beyond the sunflower seed installation in the Turbine Hall and his project at Documenta 12 which brought 1001 Chinese people to Kassel I'm not that aware of the rest of his work. I was interested to read about his enormous chandelier which is hung at ground level (shown at Mary Boone amongst other locations), I wonder if it somehow prompted Terence Koh's extraordinary black chandelier which is patinated and embellished with a bizarre and somewhat scary array of materials (paint, lollipops, vegetable matter, human and horse hair, mineral oil, rope from a ship found after midnight, glass shards, stones, artist’s blood and shit). My wife just bought a photograph of a chandelier by the Irish artist Elaine Byrne which feels deliberately overexposed and takes on the flat quality of a painting, it's beautiful and it's nice to walk into your house to find something new on the wall.